Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Like SoSG Sax, I was weaned on Intellivision. My video gaming habit continues to this day in the form of the Xbox 360. (I'm currently in the middle of both GTAIV and Call of Duty 4. Yes, I'm a little behind.)

MLB® Front Office Manager gives baseball fans the chance to experience their dream job. Take the reins of your favorite Major League™ team and build a championship roster. Make trades, sign free agents, draft prospects and manage games all the way from Spring Training through the Playoffs. Available this Winter for Xbox 360, PlayStation®3 computer entertainment system and Games for Windows, MLB® Front Office Manager is the only MLB licensed game to give fans total control of an MLB franchise.

So basically this is "Sim GM." (Snap into a Sim GM!) What's more, A's General Manager and Moneyball inspiration Billy Beane is the game's "celebrity spokesperson," and he actually appears in the game.

Is this weird enough yet? I mean, no video game should have the word "Office" in its title. Isn't this virtual pencil pushing? Obviously there's an audience for this, but how much? Will this be a big hit or a niche title?

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comments:

If you really want to play pretend GM, I'd suggest Out of the Park Baseball, Puresim, or even Baseball Mogul.

And there was already a sports game with the name office in it, Front Office Football, the fan forum of FOF is where you can find me when I'm bored ( http://www.operationsports.com/fofc/forumdisplay.php?f=6 )

Or you can kill 65 hours a week learning how to hack NES games and build your own game for the NES (the best video game system evar). Granted I didn't do the work to make it compatible with my PDA, but I'll be damned if it isn't the coolest thing ever!

Like DanGarion said, there are other games like this. I remember Baseball Mogul, though I never played it. I dunno about everybody else, but if I want to play a baseball video game, I usually want to hit a virtual ball 400 virtual feet.

It all depends on what you want to do, if you want to GM or coach, there is no better simulation then the text simulations of OOTP or Puresim, if you want to be a player, then you get MLB2k9 or The Show.

OOTP is great because there are multiplayer leagues that you can GM against other real people and tons of stats, I used to be in a league for about 4-5 years and it was a blast, even though I was never able to get the Dodgers to the World Series...

I got it as well as a couple of my friends who all love fantasy baseball and loved the book Moneyball. We also agree that this is possibly the worst game we ever bought. Menus are impossible, gameplay has great graphics yet plays like it was made in 1992, totally unrealistic stats and player movement and contracts are limited and very complicated.